Megadeth is not Aggressive enough: Marty Friedman.

In a recent interview, with Metal Shrine (Sweden), ex-Megadeth axe-man Marty Friedman claimed that he left the band because the band was not aggressive enough.
When asked if he left the band because he no more considered Megadeth having enough dose of aggressive attitude, he added ‘ Oh yes, that´s totally true. Totally, totally true. At the time when I left it was the beginning of 2000, but I actually told the guys that I was gonna leave in the middle of ´99, but that´s another story. I left in 2000 an at that time every other band was just about a 1000 times more aggressive than we were.

At the time you had I guess Korn and Marilyn Manson and even Limp Bizkit had stuff that was deeply heavy and our stuff just sounded thin and small and to my ear it just sounded really dated and very old fashioned and traditional. There´s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things and in fact a lot of people who are into heavy metal, really like that traditional sound and don´t want it to change, so that´s a very valid point and I understand it especially since I´ve been an Ramones fan since I was a baby. When they changed just the slightest thing I got all crazy, so I understand that but with a name like Megadeth and all the other bands are just blowing you away with this big deep heavy sound that is way scarier and way harder and more aggressive than a band called Megadeth, it was not turning me on anymore.

I was like “Let´s do one thing or the other! Let´s either get friggin´ heavier or let´s just be a little bit more marketable, because right now, we´re kind of an underground band and we shouldn´t be. We´ve got so much great potential within the four members of the band that we shouldn´t be an underground traditional metal band.”. That´s not where I wanted to go, but maybe that´s where they wanted to go. It was just a completely musical decision why I left the band and it had absolutely nothing to do with any personal problems. I was just seeing all these other bands and I love aggressive music, but it´s gotta be really fucking aggressive. I hear stuff now like Decapitated and stuff like that. I would´ve wanted to play stuff more in that vein than what we were doing. I thought, maybe our first couple of records when I joined the band were kind of aggressive for that time, but there was so much stuff after it that I would say was trumping us in that department. I know music´s not a competition and I wasn´t competing, but I just thought that other bands were doing what I thought we should do better. I don´t know why we were always in the mid tempo kind of 80´s thrash metal zone and we were all beyond that, but that´s really what I meant back then and I totally meant it.